Published 4:00 am, Saturday, May 24, 2003

Has any single jazz musician been more maligned than Jelly Roll Morton? He has been branded a liar, braggart, racist, hustler, pimp and, worst of all, a hopeless has-been. He was given short shrift in the
Ken Burns
TV series "Jazz, " and the Broadway musical based on his work, "Jelly's Last Jam," hardly did his reputation any good, fashioning a fictional version of the man far removed from his real life.

In the first biography in more than 50 years on this key figure in the birth of jazz ("The Life, Music and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton"), authors Howard Reich and William Gaines used an extraordinary cache of recently discovered documents to rescue the reputation of the brilliant Creole musician,

the first man to put on paper the nascent music emanating from French Quarter whorehouses.

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was born at least 10 years before the dawn of the 20th century (there remains confusion about his exact birth date), and he was thrown out of his home at 16 when his grandparents discovered he had been playing piano in Storyville brothels. But, in the peculiar racist calibrations of New Orleans then, Morton, a Creole, had access to advantages denied the city's full-blooded blacks. These included formal musical training, meaning that among all the itinerant musicians practicing this blossoming new music, only Morton could commit the complex harmonics and melodies of jazz to paper. He first published "Jelly Roll Blues" in 1915.

After spending many years traveling the country -- including a period in 1919 on the West Coast, where he briefly ran a nightclub in San Francisco -- in 1923 Morton arrived in Chicago, a town that had already been introduced to jazz by cornetist King Oliver, who had brought young Louis Armstrong up the river the previous year. In Chicago, Morton met music publishers Walter and Lestor Melrose, who not only began publishing his compositions but arranged for Morton to record piano solos.

Chicago in the '20s would turn out to be the high-water mark of Morton's career. For Victor Records, he cut a series of landmark jazz recordings as Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, and he turned the town on its ear with his red-hot Dixieland jazz, which sounded improvised but was not. When he left Chicago for New York in 1928, however, Morton did not experience similar success. His career went into a spiral. But while Morton was playing for dwindling crowds, for pennies in the middle of nowhere, his songs were being recorded by jazz musicians everywhere. Bandleader Fletcher Henderson scored a major hit in 1932 with Morton's "King Porter Stomp," the same number that sparked the career of the "King of Swing," Benny Goodman, in 1935.

In 1938, playing a crummy long-running engagement in Washington, D.C., Morton sat for interviews with Library of Congress archivist Alan Lomax. He also engaged in correspondence with the jazz journal Down Beat, apparently miffed that blues composer W.C. Handy would take credit for the invention of jazz, music far more complicated than the three-chord blues that were Handy's specialty. Morton carefully outlined his claim to having invented jazz in 1902,

a dubious boast not without a measure of truth that he repeated in the Library of Congress interviews.

At the same time, Morton began petitioning anyone he could think of to help him secure royalties for his much-recorded compositions. The Melrosees paid him nothing. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers refused him admission into their ranks, eventually relenting but only allowing him a greatly reduced royalty rate.

When Morton pulled into New York again in 1938, a town alive with the vital,

sparkling jazz sounds of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others, he was a washed-up, defeated man, making futile efforts to gain some recognition for his contributions and some of his financial rewards.

The authors discovered a huge collection of documents relating to Morton's life and career that had been assiduously assembled by New Orleans jazz collector William Russell, who died at age 87 in 1992. He left behind an apartment crammed with aging papers stuffed in old shirt boxes and paper bags. These scraps of history painfully document Morton's relentless pursuit of his due.

When he died in 1941, Morton was a forgotten man, broken in spirit and health. In his final days, he plucked the diamond out of his front tooth to help pay hospital bills. His music lives on, but Reich and Gaines, both award- winning journalists at the Chicago Tribune, where their research on Morton first appeared in a series of articles several years ago, have rescued the real man from the dustbin of history.